The Skeptic الشكاك

104 A Long, Dark Summer?

The Past Week

In Dahab, on Monday, three bombs killed at least 18 people and injured 85 more. Local residents say the death toll is higher. On Wednesday, in north Sinai near the Egyptian-Israeli border, two suicide bombers blew themselves up in an attempted attack against MFO forces stationed there to make sure Sinai is not remilitarized. Last night I had dinner with a travel agent who was across the street from the first bomb in Dahab. In a stroke of terrible luck, he was also staying in the hotel that was attacked later that night. No description, he said, could convey the horror of the carnage: the scattered body parts, the wounded.

Early reports suggest the government is blaming and arresting the usual suspects en masse. This time, it also arrested Al-Jazeera’s Cairo bureau chief Hussein Abd al-Ghani. He will face charges of “spreading false news,” presumably under Article 102(bis) of the Penal Code, one of the many laws free expression groups have long campaigned to repeal.

Also on Monday, at 2:30 in the morning, hundreds of police and beltagiya–hired thugs–beat and detained 12 young Kifaya activists staging a sit-in protest in solidarity with reformist members of the Judges’ Club. They are still in custody awaiting trial. One witness described seeing a young man beaten by 20 men in civilian clothes. She tried to intervene, but was restrained by her friends out of concern for her safety. She recalled seeing his face covered in blood as he fell out of the police truck. When Judge Mahmoud Abd al-Latif tried to stop the crackdown, beltagiya beat him. He reportedly told BBC Arabic that the men threatened to sexually assault him, but that he told them “My honor and my dignity are in my soul, not my ass” (I wonder if they ran that quote). A Kifaya statement lists the following seven people as among those detained on Monday:

• Karim al-Shair
• Ahmed Maher
• Mohamed al-Sharkawi
• Emad Farid
• Hamada Faysal
• Mohamed Roshdi
• Ahmed Yasser al-Droubi
• Ahmed Salah.

I first started getting urgent calls and text messages about this early on Monday morning, just as some friends and I pulled out of Cairo on a microbus to the White Desert. I managed to speak with a few witnesses by phone before I left the cell-phone coverage area. A friend collected this testimony from Ibrahim Khaled, one of the founding members of Kifaya and a journalist for Al-Karama and Rose al-Yousef. Video footage taken by Wael Abbas confirms his report. (I saw Abbas at the Journalists’ Syndicate last night, by the computers. Bloggers report he’s still hiding in the syndicate).

We got in from the desert Wednesday night. I had been in the door five minutes when I got an urgent phone call saying the police had started beating and detaining Kifaya activists who had returned to protest the crackdown on outspoken judges. Traffic was unusually bad throughout the city because the police had closed down a large chunk of downtown. By the time I arrived, the police had cleared out most of the activists. There was an army of policemen massed outside the Journalists’ Syndicate and the Judges’ Club, blocking all entrances, preventing anyone from entering.

Matthew Carrington, who was on the steps of the Journalists’ Syndicate, gave me telephone updates on the situation inside (his account is at Arabist.net). I saw individual protesters arrested as they tried to leave the protest as I paced and eavesdropped on the plainclothesmen’s banter on the other side of the police lines.

Eventually I managed to talk my way through the police lines by going through another entrance. A group of perhaps 20, mostly older activsts were on the steps of the Journalists’ Syndicate. Many were afraid to leave for fear of being arrested on their way out. I took some photos, spoke to a few protesters and journalists on the steps, and went to the roof to take some photos of the scene on the street below. As I was on the roof making friends with a Security agent posing as a journalist and grilling me in the friendliest, oiliest possible way, Matthew called saying that he was leaving with some activist friends who wanted a khawaga escort to help them through the police lines. I left with them and promised the “journalist” we’d have tea another time soon.
According to a Kifaya statement, the following activists were among those arrested last night:

• Kamal Khalil (Socialist Studies Center)
• Ibrahim El Sahari (Socialist Studies Center)
• Islam Hanafi
• Akram El Irani
• Bahaa Saber
• Hussein Mohamed Ali (Al-Ghad Party)
• Khaled Ali
• Saher Gad (journalist)
• Seif Abdallah (Al-Karama party)
• Tarek Hassan
• Karim Mohamed
• Malek Mostafa
• Mohamed Al-Agami
• Mohamed Daridir
• Mohamed Adel (wounded)
• Mohamed Abd al-Rahman
• Mohamed Fawzi Imam
• Yasser Badran
• Gamal Abd al-Fattah
• Sameh Mohamed Said
• Sami Diab

Dangerous Times

The government’s recent erratic behavior bespeaks weakness. On the eve of a major terrorist attack, the Interior Ministry felt sufficiently threatened by a few dozen young protesters camped on the street in support of the Judges’ Club to deploy several hundred men to beat them, arrest them, and disperse them. As one protester on the steps of the Journalists’ Syndicate last night noted, this suggests misplaced priorities.

In fairness, since the attack the government has tightened security throughout the country, not just in front of the Journalists’ Syndicate and Judges’ Club. The day after the bombings in Sinai, security was tightened even at checkpoints on the empty roads of the Western Desert, far from Sinai. There are appreciably more police in the capital, and they are appreciably more vigilant.

But if the masses of police cordoning off the neighborhood around the Journalists’ Syndicate and the Judges’ Club last night were there to maintain order, they were there to do it by intimidating democrats into silence… or to silence them by kicking their teeth in.

Is the government overreacting? Perhaps not. Terrorist attacks have returned to Egypt for the first time in almost 10 years. Attempts to rig the elections quietly while touting Egypt’s “progress toward democracy” failed spectacularly. The judicial branch of government is challenging the executive’s control over the courts. But the judges are also revolting against the executive’s control of the legislative branch. Mubarak’s long reign and the state’s suffocation of political life has made the question of succession particularly vexing. Gamal’s first televised interview failed to impress. People stand in front of the Interior Ministry–a place whose name inspires fear–and demand an end to torture and the Interior Minister’s term. Is there no order? Surely someone must stand up to restore order and stability. If the civilian NDP brass is too busy at Ain Sokhna, the north coast, or Davos to do it, then the long-suffering Interior Ministry must.

It’s one possible scenario. Another, reportedly advanced by the governor of Cairo to the head of the Judges’ Club after the Monday night crackdown, holds that the excessive and violent response to the protests are the fault of lower-level officers acting against the Minister’s preferences. The minister’s a reasonable man; it’s the bully culture of the rank-and-file that’s to blame.

Actually, the message is a reassuring one: Judges are still not acceptable targets of police brutality. Troublemaking Kifaya kids are.

But the number of troops deployed to clear the small Kifaya sit-in cannot be ascribed to the rank-and-file. In recent memory, police have always outnumbered protesters by at least 10 to one. The most recent protests were unusual for their violence, and in the factor by which police outnumbered protesters. I saw, by my conservative estimate, well over 1,000 police outside the Journalist’s Syndicate and the Judges’ Club last night–for perhaps 20 protesters.

Either scenario leaves doubts as to whether the Interior Ministry is best suited to guide Egypt through this difficult time–particularly in conjunction with the resurgence of political violence, flares of sectarian strife in Alexandria, the disastrous crackdown on a sit-in protest of Sudanese refugees, and Security’s heavyhanded tactics in the ill-managed rigging of the most recent elections.It’s easy to understand why the Interior Ministry might feel it must show it’s in control. As one friend of mine put it recently, “What’s the point of living in a police state if you don’t get any of the benefits?”

It’s precisely this kind of sentiment that I fear might make the Interior Ministry overreact in the coming months. If they do, they will make more gaffes, scar more young men for life, and make people seething mad because they’re stuck in traffic. None of this is will make Egypt more stable.

Yes, the police state has helped keep Egypt stable. But the country’s stability ulitimately owes more to its good and reasonable people. Egyptians, if I may be so bold, are also justly patriotic. The government could weather the coming changes more smoothly by appealing to people’s essential goodness and patriotism than by attempting to intimidate those who speak out into submission.

In a similar vein, the government would do better to use Al-Jazeera to make its appeal than to imprison the station’s bureau chief. Ask anyone here whether he trusts an Interior Ministry press release or an Al-Jazeera report more and you’ll probably get a laugh. The people are not stupid. Given the choice, they would choose what anyone would: to live their lives in peace. The government should let them.

[tags]Egypt, judges, sinai[/tags]

3 Comments »

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1. Autumn of fury?

   Great reporting ya Elijah!

   Comment by Ibn ad Dunya — April 28, 2006 #

2. Great Work!

   Comment by jpierre — April 28, 2006 #

3. Good stuff, Elijah. I fear it’s going to be an ugly summer. But at least it will be interesting.

   Comment by praktike — April 28, 2006 #

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